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Dream Journal

Cymbal Sounds and Buried Glass

Watching TV in master bedroom of old family house, I’m aged as I am presently but with my family relationships as they were when I was in high school, maybe. I’m watching TV, a refreshing change as it’s been so long. I note that it’s like scrying, you don’t know what you’re going to get when you flip channels. I add 100 to whatever’s on and end up seeing part of an interview by someone named Leon Turkas, or Leone Turkes, some older funk-era black musician I remember to have one song by (note: no such artist was found upon waking).

From a viewpoint floating above San Francisco, I see that there are many more repurposed or semi-abandoned military buildings than I realized before. I spot one in particular, cracked wood and partially overgrown with spiky vines, lying between a major road and a parking lot for two other buildings — just out there, waiting to be explored.

Hanging out with my family, my little brother Chris (who is maybe 7-10 in this dream?) asks if I will let him practice massage. Lying on my back, he works on something he calls “windowpanes”, which are my upper pectorals. This goes on a while; he stops, someone says something to the effect “you should be good”, “you’ve gotten enough”, etc.

Now at an outdoor pool near the ocean, I rant at my brothers about the kind of people who make palindromes. They’re the kind of people who need something to occupy their minds, holding and manipulating multiple simultaneous variables, running an excessively complicated algorithm just to burn CPU cycles on their head-computer. Fucking untrustworthy mentats who don’t want to be alone with themselves. Well, I thought the rant was funny.

One of us brothers makes the sound of a cymbal with his mouth, a clean shhhhhhimm-m-m sound, as a comment during conversation. Chris follows it with a sound like sh-sh-sh-sh-sh, which my Dad says doesn’t sound like a cymbal at all. I come to his defense, saying it’s a cymbal with a lot of shimmer on it, which I feel somehow proud to understand and point out.

I wander away from them for a bit to explore. The pool and the beach are a bit like the ruins of Sutro Baths. In the middle distance I see what looks like smoke rising from a low, rocky outcrop. A few others notice it too. On the way to investigate I notice a dead whale on the beach, upside down, with spotty fur and ears. It has fuzzy white tufts over it, and I realize the smoke in the distance is actually steam, and it’s so cold outside frost has begun to form.

Satisfied there is no danger, I practically trip over an odd-shaped item half-buried in the grey-ish/brown-ish beach sand. I pull it out and it’s an elaborate sealed glass container, radially symmetric with alternate bulges and necks and ridges, inexplicably filled with what looks like a mixture of seawater and beach sand. There are a few intact ones I pull out before reaching some broken pieces underneath, which (since I’m already wearing gloves) I set aside to be disposed of properly. A family with small kids pass by as I’m working on this and the little girl in pigtails (maybe 5-6 years old) reaches out to feel the glass objects, though I warn her not to touch the broken ones. She defiantly rubs her hand on them anyway, and I look up and realize it’s a black family. They pointedly don’t react. I’m left wondering whether there must’ve been some black/white dynamic even from a kid that age, some “no white man gonna tell me what to do” aspect.

Woke up with “Mr. Blue Sky” as covered by Pomplamoose in my head. Surprised my wife by playing it in the living room remotely before I joined her in the living room. Ha!

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Dream Journal

Keanu’s Midnight Movie Favor

On the top floor of an abandoned school, the walkways are completely inundated with trash. You can see even more of it layering the ground in hills from this high vantage, and this is enough of a novelty that people visit and it becomes an attraction. The waist-high concrete walls of the round corner balcony have been given elaborate murals, inspirational remnants from it’s time as a (elementary?) school. There’s a post-apocalyptic teen movie vibe.

I’m approached by a middle-age bearded guy asking me to do him a personal favor. Surprised, I realize it’s Keanu Reeves. I manage to do the favor, which involves closing the doors to (his?) movie theater near the mural, at the start of the Rocky Horror midnight showing. Makes sense, as I can imagine what the reaction of a packed midnight movie would be to spotting Keanu at the door. He thanks me and gives me some sort of token.

Similar to how right now, during quarantine, one doesn’t make outings as much, in this dream only cashless order-online places are open. I visit two such stores near the far end of a long mall, somewhere I feel I’ve dreamed of before — although I didn’t even think of it as a mall this time. The stores are clean and novel, merchandise displayed on floor-to-ceiling shelves, but for the moment they mostly only have shampoos and other bath stuff in stock. I remember there’s an Amazon store somewhere in the center, and make my way there while carrying a rolling barstool on my back. I lean on this occasionally during on the walk there, and no one seems to mind although I sometimes reckon I’m too young for it.

Skip ahead and I’m with a redheaded friend, headed somewhere together through twisty, rugged dirt paths. We pass a group of women talking about a place called the Fergiles, a group of islands I deduce. I walk ahead a little ways while she remains behind in a small hollow. My sibling Patrick is now with me, and we notice the end of a log has had its end made into a fairy cottage, a gnome home, in the shape of an Ewok’s face. I start to open it but he warns that if it’s anything like the others he’s seen, it probably has a lizard hiding in it (a Betta lizard? like a Betta fish).

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Dream Journal

Prison in the Deep Hills

Tegan, teenage girl I meet who wants relationship but we have to split up for a bit. In saying goodbye I pronounce her name as Reagan, then Regan, then Teagan. As I’m lying on floor, she does ridiculous poses with her torso distorted, making her junk look ridiculous too, and I ask and take a photo up near her crotch. Somehow this proves (and is meant to prove) she does really like me. A worthwhile souvenir, and an image strong enough to survive the whole night’s dreams.

Falsely imprisoned in a remote location, somewhere in the occupied Tibetan mountains. Sewing a pattern of beads into what passes for camouflage. Discovering a former prisoner has left instructions to a map crafted into a hillside, showing a multi-day escape route. Guards suggesting everything was washed out in a flood. Gathering together small colored objects of various shapes for some prisoner display, I instead arrange them in a replica of a map to the map.

A road passes outside the prison. Against the roadside slope, I secretly bury a colonized tray of mushroom starter under a garden bed. It looks like the same beaded camouflage. Passing by on the curvy mountain road are automated robotic garbage cans, cows with their directions pre-programmed. I cling to the underside of one briefly before it skids off-road, not having been programmed for added weight.

Close by in the mountains is the Akrokorinth, much closer than expected. Perhaps 27 meters. It’s a walled funeral arena.

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Dream Journal

The Landlord-Hidden Stairs

Our apartment has the same landlord, but is in a 5-10 story skyscraper in New York. There is a set of convenient stairs which the landlord has blocked off. I make my way through a public elevator to three rooftop garden mall, which the landlord also owns. On a path near the edge of the roof, I see strings of Christmas lights left unhung on the ground. I manage to sneak into my own hone by going down a disused private elevator behind the shucking station of a Chinese restaurant there. It’s a charming hand-hewn wood space that reminds me of a spice rack, and it looks like the old lady next door has one just like it. Perhaps that’s why he blocked it off, he couldn’t separate the two and couldn’t bring it up to code as a communal space.

A different dream possibly. On our outside stairway, the landlord has taken all the plants. He’s told my wife (who assures me he said he’ll bring them back) but I still complain that he gets to take them for an entire spring season.

I’m reading a book in class, might be reading on my phone. Walk from the front of the classroom to the back. A small cloud of vapor escapes the precession of students, but I’m not sure if it came from my mouth or the older black student in front of me. Girls practicing basketball in the gym, studying collisions by crashing their bodies mid-throw. I meet a childhood friend, Robby T., as an adult finally. I ask if he even goes by Robby anymore and tell him of my new name. He tells me he was taken out of school at some point. I walk away for a minute and my backpack’s missing. I find it quickly, intuiting that the Robby of now would hide it, as was a prank we might play on each other in school, but wouldn’t hide it far as that would be funnier for me to fail searching for it.

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Dream Journal

A Dream with a Lotta Stuff

[Stefon meme] This dream has everything: spearfishing Ewoks, the greater city of Baltimore, urban renewal, a passport control office, class trips to a death spire, a mental ward with random small animals, and Lil Nas X performing a cover of a version of a David Bowie song with his dick out.

Ewoks hunting with spears by the shore of a straight, marshy river, perhaps a canal. Secretive. Traditional. Trying to return to my Ewok brethren, but floating somewhere in the greater Baltimore region — called Mellopotron (pronounced in a Greek manner). City is having a blue-collar revolution, replacing ugly cheap infrastructure (for example chain-link fencing with signs zip-tied on) with permanent works of concrete, making it look less mean but somehow more irredeemably urban, decided.

I go through a passport control office during a school field trip, a group with a field trip vibe anyway, even knowing my passport is missing. Somehow, maybe I get rapport with the guards, I get through and begin the climb with the rest of the class up a bony, jagged “death spire” at nighttime. When it’s time to go down, I break out my wings (a wingsuit? appendages?) and glide over the heads of my companions — even knowing I’d probably pay a price for the experience.

And I do. I’m interned in a mental ward, one that I’ve been in once before. Comparatively this time is a breeze, since I knew in advance what I was choosing. Still, I hide the fact from my companions. Every now and again I’ll throw out the odd mention of, for instance, how weird it was when the nurse’s station used to have its counter open to the patient’s room when no nurse was there. A small scurrying animal, maybe a rat or a lizard, creeps from one room to another undetected — perhaps a transmogrified companion? We are assembled for a special guest. Much to our surprise, rapper Lil Nas X drops from the ceiling and performs an amazing cover of Major Tom (Coming Home), in a long flowing trench-coat… with his dick out.

Flying up to what was supposed to be our lodging, a dilapidated but beautiful hand-restored floating bus house in someone’s backyard. 30 feet above the ground — which I don’t even look at — it rocks back and forth, left abandoned for what I discern is some lamentable procedural reason. I note how even in its aged state, it could still drive around the side of the multi-story house, where cargo containers are stacked up nearly to the roof.

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Dream Journal

Three Guys Troll the Bus Driver

Three guys are sitting on a bus, just behind the driver. They start reading from a binder with a script, half-pretending to be practicing for an upcoming production. But the real goal is to act out a believable conversation three people could actually have on a bus that’s so absurd, so disturbing, so weird, that the bus driver can’t ignore it. That didn’t take long, and the driver stops the bus and thoroughly chew them out, saying it doesn’t even matter whether it’s real or whatever, where would someone even get this weird-ass shit? The whole thing is hilarious to the utmost.

A school band is demoing some of their unique instruments. The one I remember has trumpet valves and horn bottom half, with a clarinet’s mouthpiece top. It ends up sounding a bit like a saxophone, actually.

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Dream Journal

Short Stairs Make Quick Work

I see my friend from middle and high school, Alexx Sanchez. I never did finish that drawing of her as an elf that she requested in 7th grade — I didn’t know how to draw, and I still don’t think I could make a passable go of it. Demonstrating some of the knowledge of the weird sandstone building we’re in, since I’ve been working there so long, I slide down set of stairs with an extremely low ceiling (perhaps a 2 foot space). I then call to her from the subterranean work area. She looks mildly horrified that we’re expected to get in and out through a space so small.

My younger friend Lily Z. is in a band. I round the corner of my high school, playing a drum, telling her about three other Lilys I met with her exact name, and how strangely different and the same they are.

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Dream Journal

Moving Scooter, Unseen

Sitting on my scooter around the corner from home. I’ve been awake most of the night, in and out, and realize now it’s Thursday morning and time to move it for street-sweeping. I start it up and carefully putter it down the wrong side of the street, mostly pushing it — yet I don’t have my glasses on and realize it’d be safer to not even have the engine running.

Both about the odd calculations about safety I come to, and the necessary reminder to move my bike. Wasn’t even Thursday, though, so just goes to show I didn’t know what day it was.

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Dream Journal

Nautical Art Show

Nautical group art show. Different boats and boat themed objects. One object on loan from the Riverside County Museum has recently been improved since last time I looked. It’s a polymer sculpted little white boat, a tiny compass underneath a flip-top cap on top of the cabin. But just looking at it bares a kind of threat — it was made by Casey, a much disliked ex of my wife.

As I (with difficulty) attempt to lounge on a craggy rock (with Dana trying to lean back and relax on my leg), another art object is demonstrated by its creator. He’s wrapped a boot in a clever layer of canvas fabric, folding the edges to look like a keel. The patches where the boot boat leaked are only revealed when he points them out.

Watching a lanky latino chef prepare some kind of galley meal, his friend loading the dishwasher at the corner of the stainless steel kitchen. One thing pushes into another, a bin of forks falls over the side but lands upright, luckily. I’m young and eager, and pop up to grab it for him. I observe his internal debate as he tries to calculate if he has enough time to wash a single blender jug.

Maneport Hub, a modern 80s TV show take on the “keeping up with the pirates” drama. See a short clip where a lady is strapped off the gunnels and being hosed down waterboard style. The camera pulls back and it’s revealed she’s just practicing. The files are in a folder, and I accidentally delete the main folder exposing all the sub-season folders and the text entries and the like.

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Dream Journal

Hot Vampire, Bedroom Rain, Hardware Construction

A vampire demonstrates some of his heating powers. First round isn’t too hot, then he has his girlfriend back up. Guess he’s a Twilight-kinda vampire, having someone called a girlfriend and all. The next time he glows bright red. This is a family entertainment show, and I remember thinking how rare it is to see people just comfortably naked (on TV). Someone brings up the idea of using the ultra-cool morgue refrigerator to keep them chill, but aren’t sure if it would kill them.

I spot my 92 year old Grandma walking away down a grassy sidewalk. I try to say goodbye to her as she leaves a gathering. Though I’m myself, fully grown, I still feel like an infant, like it’s still the 1980s, like my relationship to her has never changed.

In the smaller of my childhood bedrooms (second night in a row, here). I’m letting rain run down the walls, dripping from the white “cottage cheese” ceiling, flooding the hardwood floor in an inch of water. My original bedroom had neither that ceiling nor that floor. I remember to peek under the bed and inspect the spot where floorboards are cracked and missing. I reflect that I’m 36 and still live with my parents, gazing at my mannish arm hair. While I don’t precisely feel like a loser, I also don’t feel like someone to be envied.

There’s a hardware store under construction across the street from my home. It’s replacing a leaky warehouse where the second floor temporarily housed my favorite art store, SCRAP. Climbing down from peering over the wall, I notice that an AirBnB there has placed a painted post outside, horizontal rings of dull green and red. It’s a crude wayfinder for helping guests, and I’m sure unlawful, but the longer I look the more I admire it — and the matching ring-shaped gate made similarly. Crude, yet beautiful.